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As I find gems, I'll post them here. Feel free to pitch a book to me for a potential review.
Oh, yes. I'll let you know about my clients' books, too. But I'll disclose that my clients are my clients. ... they wouldn't want it any other way.

Catatonia Emerges in a New Book

How can catatonia be a major psychiatric illness when no-one
knows what it is? Could it be that psychiatry has lost touch with the real
mental disorders? The question is important because catatonia is probably more
treatable than anything else in psychiatry. And it affects one patient in every
ten with a serious illness — but first it has to be recognized.

It is not a form of “schizophrenia,” and does not respond
well to the anti-schizophrenic drugs that many doctors might be inclined to use.

In his novel, The Winter Soldier, Daniel Mason writes of a World War I
soldier's body that is curled up among a pile of roots: "Alive...But it
doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak." The fictional soldier's body only
twitches when someone touches his shoulder. "The man’s eyes were wide, his
nose flared, as he tried to take in breath. But no words, nothing save the
flinch, the stare," the novel continues.

That is a fair description of catatonia, a bodily condition.
Staring, stupor, mutism, food refusal: these are the watchwords. Patients are
cut off from their surroundings. They make also make strange, purposeless
movements.

Catatonia is now found in many disorders and also on
its own. It occurs often among adolescents, the severely depressed and
manic, and in toxic conditions. Withdrawal, mutism, stupor, excitement, and
febrile states are now recognized as catatonia.

The story of this remarkable medical milestone is
highlighted in the new Oxford University Press publication, The Madness of Fear: A History of Catatonia, written by the
historian of medicine Edward Shorter and the clinician neuropsychiatrist Max
Fink.

This important book will help clinicians and the educated
public recognize the disorder and ask for its proper treatment. Clinicians can
make patients with catatonia better on a reliable basis. There are not many
illnesses in psychiatry that are highly responsive to treatment, but catatonia
is one of them.

Patients who are successfully treated can return to their
communities. Most of the time, they do not have residual symptoms and do not
relapse. "It is a kind of miracle," say Shorter and Fink. "Even
patients who have been in long-term catatonic stupors can go on to have new
lives."

So why has there been so little psychiatric interest in
catatonia? In The Madness of Fear, Drs. Shorter and Fink seek to
understand why this “vast field of ignorance” exists. In the history of
catatonia, they see a remarkable story about how medicine flounders, and then
seems to find its way. And it will help doctors, and the public recognize and
successfully treat this core illness in psychiatry.

The initiative started during the government shutdown when a
few concerned Randolph residents reached out to Town Councillor Natacha
Clerger to help one family. "I would cook food and bring it over to
the kids while the parents were at work," Clerger recalls. "Then it
was three families, and then ten. Since I could not afford to feed so many, I approached
a few contacts that I have in Boston, and that was the beginning. I had so much
produce to donate the first day that I decided to open it to the entire town
and anyone who feels the need." …

The "Mama Mia, Part 2" movie was supposed to be the cultural highlight of my summer. That let me down, bigly.

I am not easy to please.

There are 844 books downloaded onto my Kindle and another 2,197 archived items. (I call my Kindle "Cokie" for a reason.) That's 3,041 ebooks, and I don't even want to tell you how many actual printed books I have stacked in every nook and cranny (in fact, I may be wearing several of them).

The point here is that I have way too much reading material to whine that I have "nothing to read." But, for much of the summer, I flitted about from book to book, taking a few sips of one and lingering for a couple of days at another, but savoring few of them for very long.

I'm a book publicist. That means that, in many ways, my job is a dream come true. I get paid to read books and, frequently, the books that I promote are books that I'd want to read even if I weren't getting paid to read them.
That said, I read more than my share of books that are not written by clients. Some of these books are too good to not share.
As I find gems, I'll post them here.
Oh, yes. And as I come across great books by clients, I'll let you know about those, too. I'll always tell you when I book I'm blogging about has been written by a client, though. That's only fair, I think.
If you'd like your book to be reviewed, feel free to email me at stacey at bookpr dot com.